"People often say that Sarah Palin anticipated the rise of Donald Trump, but you could say the same of Pat Buchanan or Ross Perot or Herman Cain..."

"... depending on your focus. Trumpism is perhaps best understood as two things: populist-right mood and populist-right policy. The mood is one of resentment toward predatory or incompetent elites, and the policy (in theory, at least) is one of strength through self-containment — whether regarding immigration or commerce or military deployment. J.D. Vance, running for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, represents Trumpism mainly as policy, while Palin represents it mainly as mood. This can make Palin maddeningly hazy on issues that many conservatives and liberals alike care about most.... People often point to personality traits shared by Palin and Trump, such as thin skin and self-absorption... Both have thin skins, but Trump’s covers a hearty and insensate core; Palin described being excluded from McCain’s funeral as a 'gut punch' and told Fox host Sean Hannity that she could watch Tina Fey’s impression of her only with 'the volume all the way down.' Trump enjoys riling the other side, while Palin, despite her flame throwing, seems most eager to please her own side....  Palin’s religious faith alarms many of her critics in a way that Trump’s religious faith, if that’s what you can call it, never did.... [W]hen it comes to self-aggrandizement, her faith also appears to discourage her from Trumpian excesses.... If we can tell a human story of Sarah Palin, maybe people can wish her victory or defeat instead of vengeful triumph or destruction...."

Writes T.A. Frank in "Sarah Palin Has Long Been Ridiculed. I Wanted to Tell a Different Story. A reconsideration of the narrative that surrounds her as she runs for Congress" (WaPo).

"Sexually assaulted in full view of millions, the 18-year-old boy really has no option but to treat it as a joke."

I just happened to land on this post from a mere 5 years ago:

Look at the photograph of the hulking Jenny McCarthy grabbing Justin Bieber by the throat and suctioning the back of his neck:

"Wow. I feel violated right now," he said, laughing.

"I did grab his butt," McCarthy said backstage. "I couldn't help it. He was just so delicious. So little. I wanted to tear his head off and eat it."

Imagine the sexes reversed. If you can. McCarthy is more than twice Bieber's age. She's 40. But, oh, she's trying so hard to project sexuality....

I said "stop molesting teenagers. That's not funny, even if circumstances require Bieber to pretend that it is." Here's the photograph:

[PHOTO REMOVED]

 
How did I happen upon that? I was searching my archive for "men's project," after seeing a link at at Instapundit to the Campus Reform piece "The University of Wisconsin-Madison has confirmed that it has disbanded its 'Men’s Project,' a program designed to teach 'men-identified students' about the harms caused by traditional notions of masculinity."

The McCarthy molestation post had the word "men's" ("She first posed for the men’s mag at 21, which helped launch her career as a sexy doofus") and "project" ("She's 40. But, oh, she's trying so hard to project sexuality").

Anyway, the UW "Men's Project." I must have paid attention to that, since it involves my school and topics I care about, but I can't find an old post. My question is whether the Men's Project was as heavy-handed and demeaning as Campus Reform makes it sound.

IN THE COMMENTS: CJ said points to this "SNL" routine with Tina Fey as a teacher fantasizing about sex with her student, played by Justin Bieber. This is from April 2010:

[VIDEO REMOVED]

 
CJ's comment is "I remember watching this when it aired and saying to my fiancee at the time - 'God this skit could've been so much funnier but they're obviously scared of sexualizing Bieber too much - but that's the whole point of the sketch!'"

I think that sketch is great. Pitch perfect, right down to the "I'm going to go call Gloria Allred." It's prescient... about a future that still isn't quite here, the point when #MeToo extends to men accusing women.

Ah, wait, CJ comes back:

Not to spam the comment thread, but I wanted to explain the sketch more - the premise is that Bieber is super cute and even adult women are attracted to him so Tina Fey starts sexualizing him and imagining her life with him as her boyfriend (and lover, it's heavily implied). It's something you could never do with an underage girl, even in jest, and I think SNL knows that. But they wanted to seize on how cute Bieber is and make a sketch about it, but they stopped before it got actually sexual and therefore it's not that funny, just kind of weird.

I don't know if SNL expected the audience to "get it" and take what Tina Fey is doing a step further on our own, and thus it'd be funny because we know what the writers *wanted* to say even though they couldn't say such things on TV about an underage boy, or if they legitimately wanted to stop the joke before it got actually sexual, in which case it's really not all that funny.

"In some ways, it’s never been easier to be a political comedian: the Trump jokes write themselves."

"In other ways, though, it’s never been harder: amid all the absurdity, the most consequential issues imaginable are at stake," writes New Yorker editor David Redneck...

Damn you, autocorrect.

That's New Yorker editor  David Remnick, writing in email pushing me to read various articles about "comedians who are helping us to understand and survive the chaos." They've got something about Samantha Bee, whose political satire is, we're told, “slash-and-burn” (which sounds like more chaos) and something about John Oliver, who, we're told, is "cable’s king of catharsis" (catharsis cures chaos?).

I'm interested in this idea that it's easy to do comedy now because "the Trump jokes write themselves," because I was just reading "SNL’s Toothless Trump Schtick Is Tired as Hell/After a record-breaking, Emmy-winning season, ‘Saturday Night Live’ is struggling to get laughs with its unimaginative Trump-bashing skits." 

That's by Matt Wilstein in The Daily Beast — published 2 days ago and thus not taking account of the Trump-bashing cold open on last night's show. Wilstein is particularly critical of comedy writing that is "barely an exaggeration of what the real Trump said during a speech a day earlier" (like when Alec Baldwin's comic Trump told the mayor of San Juan, "I don’t know if you know this, but you’re on an island in the water, the ocean water, big ocean, with fishies and bubbles and turtles that bite," after real Trump had said, "This is an island surrounded by water. Big water. Ocean water").

Last summer, before Baldwin had started playing Trump, author Malcolm Gladwell used another iconic SNL impression—Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin—to denounce what he viewed as the show’s “toothless” satire problem. Like Baldwin, Fey would often just repeat what Palin had actually said for comic effect. “They want the laugh, so they make fun of the way she talks,” Gladwell said on his podcast. “But the way she talks is not the problem.” The same could be said for Baldwin’s Trump.

And that’s the same critique that John Oliver levied this week on Late Night with Seth Meyers, albeit without naming Baldwin or SNL. “It’s easy to do bad comedy, because you just need to repeat what he says,” Oliver said. “And that’s not a joke, that’s repetition. Whereas comedy, especially if you want to try to do something that’s not just happening online all the time, is an effort.”

If it's easy, you're doing it wrong. That seems to be the proposition.

What I'd say is: Those who want to do anti-Trump humor need to understand that Trump himself is a comedian. I'm not saying Trump is just a clown, and it's crazy that we made a clown President. I'm saying, whatever his worth as human being carrying out the duties of the presidency, he is also a comic talent, with many humorous insights, great timing, and — like the greatest comedians — he's challenging us to see what's funny and what's serious as he mixes it up and causes anxiety that we can relieve if we climb out of the ocean of confusion and onto the island of laughter.

You don't have to like any given comedian, and a comedian who wields tremendous political power is going to fail to amuse most people. In fact, whatever your politics, you're not going to be a very funny comedian if you just think of the President as a wonderful humorist and laugh at his jokes. But you should understand the way in which he means to be funny and project yourself into the minds of the many people who do respond to his humor. You should do this, not because he deserves respect, but because it's the foundation for writing better humor yourself.

If you've been finding it easy to make fun of Trump, you are not working hard enough. It's like trying to write a brief in a hard legal case and believing your adversary's arguments are just stupid. You'd better understand the way they make sense and the thinking of the people who might hear these arguments as cogent or you're not doing it right.

"If I can take just one book, to the proverbial desert island? Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman. I would spend the rest of my life memorizing it."

"Then I would walk around the island chanting Song of Myself forever. Not a bad way to live out your days on a desert island."

From "25 Famous Women on Their Favorite Books" (in NY Magazine). I've selected the quote from Elizabeth Gilbert.

Also interesting: The book Tina Fey picks is "Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir."

I was going to say I actually don't know who Elizabeth Gilbert is. Imagining that perhaps she's one of these writers of the short stories that I always skip over when I read The New Yorker, I was going to say I actually don't know who Elizabeth Gilbert is in a kind of modest, self-effacing way. But then I looked her up and saw that she's the author of "Eat, Pray, Love," a book I'm proud that I wouldn't even consider reading. And now I'm proud that I didn't recognize her name, but I'm ashamed that I got sucked in by her quote. Song of Myself, indeed. Bleh. The very thing I liked, I now hate.

Tina Fey as Sarah Palin endorsing Donald Trump.

Last night on SNL:



"I'm here for all you teachers and teamsters, you farmers and charmers, whether you're a mom or 2 Broke Girls or 3 Men and a Baby, or a rock 'n' roller, holy roller, pushin' stroller, pro bowler with an abscessed molar...."

"I hope no one's allergic to nuts, 'cause we got a big one here. She's 2 Corinthians short of a Bible...."

Watch Sarah Palin do her Tina Fey impersonation in "31 Rock."

Via Vanity Fair which wouldn't admit it's good if it wasn't.

"SNL’s ‘Meet Your Second Wife’ Is Too Real."

"Play close attention to the men in the skit as their faces capture, with hilarious accuracy, the disgust-to-acceptance of their fate. It's so dark it just might make your mid-divorce friend laugh about her soon-to-be-ex-husband's future wife."

"Tina Fey Strips On 'The Late Show' In Honor Of David Letterman."

So... this is feminism these days?

By the way, does anyone even remember the trouble Letterman got into back in 2009?

But perhaps an exception should be made for a great late night talk show host. The funnyman's mood and ego need boosting. Just as he must have an office full of people who can write jokes and comic routines — who must share a lot of not-that-businesslike camaraderie — he needs pretty ladies to keep his senses well-honed. It's part of the structure of a business that revolves around a performer. The funnyman needs his supply of sex, and the paying career positions on the staff can be used to create a pool of potential sexual partners who will keep the old man bolstered up.

Tina Fey's rape joke.

She was hosting the Golden Globes (along with Amy Poehler ) last night:

“In ‘Into the Woods,’ ” Fey said, “Cinderella runs from her prince, Rapunzel is thrown from a tower for her prince, and Sleeping Beauty just thought she was getting coffee with Bill Cosby.” She and Poehler then took turns with their impressions of Cosby saying “I put the pills in the people . . . ” (Anyone can do a Cosby impression; anyone who remembers Cosby’s Jell-O Pudding Pops ads.) It was not the sharpened moment of post-feminist commentary that, fairly or otherwise, so many of us look for from the duo.

I don't know what "sharpened moments of post-feminist commentary" are. That writing is from WaPo TV critic Hank Stuever. I don't know how to sharpen a moment, and I don't know when Tina Fey was supposed to have passed the segment of time that is feminism into the period that lies beyond feminism — post-feminism — but I do know that if you're going to make a rape joke, you'd better figure out why you are doing it and whether you've got a good enough reason and a good enough joke.

Rape was the topic chosen by George Carlin for his "I believe you can joke about anything" monologue. (Previously discussed in last summer's post: "There's a gray area of rape, and I call it 'grape.'")

Is the fact that you can do a Cosby impression — when, per Stuever, anyone can — a good enough reason? No. But there's more: Fey's female. That might give an extra layer of protection. The ultimate justification is: Comedians should take hard shots at the powerful, and that's what this is.

"Tina Fey picking a 5 foot tall husband might suggest that she views those other taller men as potentially dangerous at a subconscious level."

"Finally, you have the answer to why this post is titled: 'Tina Fey Scar = Short Husband?' Crazy speculation?"

"Tina Fey and [Amy] Poehler tried hard, and sometimes too hard... their jokes about prosthetic penises fell flat."

Writes Alessandra Stanley about the hosting of the Golden Globes last night. Oddly, Stanley attributes the jokes that fell flat to the actresses' effort "to be like the guys and go blue."

I say oddly, because I didn't watch and I don't know what all these supposedly "blue" jokes were, but the one she referred to — without quoting — was about a topic that doesn't seem particularly like a guy thing. Prosthetic penises? That made me think of some medical devices to assist persons who have undergone penile amputations, then wonder whether  "prosthetic penises" is the way you say "dildos" and "strap-ons" in the NYT.

See, this is the kind of question you're forced to ponder when you don't watch the awards shows and you try to figure out what happened the next morning by reading the NYT.

Googling, I figured out that it was a movie thing. Extra doodads the makeup artists stick on are called "prosthetics." So like Kenneth Branagh getting a rubbery attachment for his chin so he could play Laurence Olivier, Jonah Hill submitted to genital appendagement for "The Wolf of Wall Street." Ah! Here's the text of Amy and Tina's opening routine:

AP The Wolf of Wall Street is a big nominee tonight, and I really loved the film, but some of it was too graphic. If I wanted to see Jonah Hill masturbate at a pool party, I’d go to one of Jonah Hill’s pool parties

TF Jonah Hill actually used a prosthetic penis in The Wolf of Wall Street, so you have that to look forward to the next time you eat at Planet Hollywood.

I think I get that joke, the joke that the NYT TV writer says fell flat. Correct me if I'm wrong. The idea is that a "prosthetic" really is a  medical devices for someone who has had an amputation, so if Jonah Hill wore a prosthetic penis, his real penis must have been lopped off somehow, and also, it's the mystery meat in the food at a local Hollywood restaurant.

There's more:

AP A number of big movies used prosthetic genitals this year. Blue is the Warmest Colour, The Wolf of Wall Street, Saving Mr. Banks. A lot of people don’t know that, Tom Hanks was wearing one the whole time. He’s wearing one right now – he’s really enjoying it.

So were AP and TF being like the guys? It's inconceivable that a male host on an awards show would single out an actress in the audience and talk about her genitals. If he did, critics would savage him. They wouldn't merely opine that the joke "fell flat." AP and TF were not acting like guys, they were exercising female privilege.

"Is someone deliberately sabotaging the movie careers of beloved TV comedy actors?"

"Or is some inexorable force of Marxian historical overdetermination at work, compelling Steve Carell and Tina Fey to make the kinds of sub-mediocre, machine-produced formula pictures that would once have starred Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston (and may yet!), and so rendering irrelevant all the qualities that made them irresistible on television?"

I defend Tracy Morgan for what he said about Sarah Palin and masturbation.

"It’s unfortunate Mr. Morgan showed a lack of judgment on our air with his inappropriate comments. We apologize for any embarrassment or offense it may have caused," says TNT, apologizing in nonapology form — Sorry if you were offended — for what Tracy Morgan said on "Inside the NBA."

During yesterday’s live broadcast, co-hosts Kenny Smith and Charles Barkley handed 30 Rock‘s Morgan a microphone and asked him to settle a bet: Tina Fey or Sarah Palin? “Me and him have this argument all the time, ” crowed Smith, referring to Barkley. “[Morgan's] the only one who can settle it. Tina Fey or Sarah Palin?”

I'm going to defend Morgan. He did exactly what a great comedian should do. He called bullshit on Kenny Smith and Charles Barkley. They were doing their little show and keeping it light with fully deniable sexual innuendo. The question "Tina Fey or Sarah Palin?" implied sex. What Tracy Morgan did was not to bring sex up out of nowhere. It was seeing the sex that was already being talked about — in TV-friendly maybe-we're-not-really-talking-about-it style — and to surprise with a sudden jab of straight talk as if Kenny and Charles were already openly talking about masturbation. He called bullshit on their innuendo. Now, TNT prissily withdraws. Ha. I'm offended by their prissy withdrawal. They want the benefit of Smith and Barkley's roundabout references but they don't like the comedian undercutting the deniability.

"Why are people so cruel on the internet?" Tina Fey is asked...

... after winning a Golden Globe and telling various commenters at The Envelope to "suck it." Video and commentary here. And here are the commenters at The Envelope talking about Tina talking about them:

anyone who reads the Envelope even on a cursory basis knows that when she started with "Babson LaCrosse" (who has since slunk away and changed his screen name (hahahahahhaaha) and continued with "Dianefan" and "Cougar Lover" that she was talking about The Envelope....

Oh My God! Tina is among us! I screamed at the tv when she said 'dianefan' and 'Babson LaCrosse'... I'll just start to say bad things about her right now on every single thread of this forum...

Now, Jesus said "Love your enemies," and he was onto something. And I don't mean pussy Jesus with the lambs and such. "Love your enemies" can be a muscular strategy if you do it with style, as Tina did. And I think it works especially well on the internet, where everyone is looking for love, really — aren't they? — whether they're gawking at porn sites or trashing divas.

"I had a baby, I did some traveling, I very briefly expanded my wardrobe, I made a few speeches..."

"... I met a few VIPS, including those who really impact society, like Tina Fey."

Sarah Palin describes her recent past, at the Republican Governors meeting, today.

"TV is starting to feel waaay too slooooow."

Michael Parsons writes:

The complex fractal circular time-shifted way in which my media habits now play out – hear about Tina Fey doing a Saturday Night Live impression of Sara Palin on an RSS feed, watch the clip at work on YouTube, then go home to watch the same clip being shown on The Daily Show, and then read online about what happened on the daily show via an RSS feed – means that my experience of the election had a multithreaded, always-on quality I’ve simply never experienced before. ... [M]y home network went on the fritz at 2am on election night, leaving me with only my handheld Twitter and the TV. I felt positively unplugged....

The advantages of web technology here are clearly to do with intimacy, connection, and immediacy. Twitter is a great way to consume huge amounts of information when you’re trying to understand a complex real-time process.... However, I was also struck by a much bigger, tonal difference. The BBC ‘s snooze-making election coverage was shamefully poor, and seemed to consist of a sleeping Dimbleby and a bobbing Vine, along with a few other B-grade pundits who gave the evening all the drama and insight of a minor English by-election. Broadcast TV, with its narrow tone, its low-brow certainties, just felt hopelessly out of date....

Yeah, well, that was England. We had holograms. And Parsons knows that -- perhaps because the flashy high-tech junk on American TV was mocked on the first segment of "The Daily Show" the day after the election. (Watch it here, starting at 2:48.)

You can tell TV has a sort of blurry panicked fear that the web is eating its lunch. Something Must Be Done. This is why TV presenters used daft gizmos – swingometers, touch-screen displays, even in CNN’s case, holograms, to try and stay down with the tech kids. This is like trying to be an opera singer by putting on weight, mistaking an unrelated symptom for a fundamental cause.

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade says:

"This is like trying to be an opera singer by putting on weight..."

TV: Wait! It's not over until the fat lady sings.

Us: But she can't sing, she's just fat...

It's over.

AND: XWL says the holograms were a lie:

[T]he so-called holograms were simply 2D images superimposed onto the TV broadcast.

The images were in fact tomograms, or images captured from all sides - in this case by 35 high-definition cameras set in a ring inside a special tent - reconstructed by computers and displayed on the screen.

Tomograms!

John McCain on "SNL."

The opening with Tina Fey:



On "Weekend Update" (with some booing):



McCain has excellent comic delivery. "The Sad Grandpa" made me laugh out loud.

Sarah Palin on "Saturday Night Live."

How do you think they'll handle it? I like this prediction, from Zachary Paul Sire, in the comments in The Riverside Tavern post:

Palin will be Palin, and various cast members will be dressed up like her, trying to impersonate her, auditioning so to speak. She'll be judging them in some fashion. None of them will be good. But then Tina Fey will come out and there will be some sort of split screen, face to face moment between the two of then, standing in awe of each other.

Then again, I don't know.

They aren't going to do anything political because a) they don't want to make her look bad, and b) they don't want to make her look good, either. It will be politically neutral and more about the surreal imitation that Fey does it. A sort of cinema verite moment.

But maybe by the time you get here, the show will have already aired, in which case, what did you think of it?

UPDATE: That was mildly amusing. Alec Baldwin got to stand next to Palin and insult her -- by accident, thinking she was Tina -- and then got to say something that's true: Sarah Palin is more attractive than Tina Fey. Did Fey deserve that? No. Palin seemed like a seasoned actor, which is nice... but disturbing. If our politicians are great actors, we have a big problem. [ADDED ON REWATCH: Did Baldwin say Palin is more attractive than Fey? He mistook Palin for Fey, then, corrected, told Palin she was more attractive in person. I think that means he believed Palin was less attractive than Fey, but now, seeing Palin in person, he acknowledges Palin's equivalent attractiveness. Or something. The disrespect to Fey that I thought was there is, technically, not.]

MORNING UPDATE: Palin reappeared in the "Weekend Update" section of the show, which I can see in the comments, many of you watched in real time. I had to turn the show off after a minute of the opening monologue. Really, I was interested in seeing Palin again, but I can't sit through that stuff. TiVo in the morning worked just fine. Palin was a good sport, sit-down dancing and smiling, while Amy Poehler did a hilarious rap routine. Poehler is heavily pregnant, but she doesn't let that slow her down at all, which is rather Palinesque. I laughed out loud when the Todd character came out and at the line "All the plumbers in the house, pull your pants up."

(By chance, I'd just turned on live TV to see Joe the Plumber on "Fox and Friends" and they razzed him in person about the one thing everyone thinks is funny about plumbers. As they put it: "Why don't plumbers wear belts?" Joe went on at some length on the topic -- defensive! The life of a plumber is tough. It's not easy, as some people seem to think.)

ADDED: The opening:



The rap:

You judge the new Tina Fey skit spoofing Sarah Palin.

I clicked it off at 1:29 even though I wanted to blog about it. I thought it was too dumb and boring to watch. Waiting all those long seconds with Amy Poehler nodding while the audience got and whooped about an old joke. Presumably, the writers load up the front end of a sketch with some of the good stuff, but all they had was old crap about out-of-towners coming to New York.

You know, Palin-haters, New York's electoral votes will go to Obama. It's people in other states who will decide this thing. Portraying non-New Yorkers as rubes is not only a weak comedy idea. It's a weak political idea. And tip to you comedy writers who imagine yourselves at all sophisticated: If you have a Bush = pubic hair joke, you don't have a final draft.

But, as I said, I clicked off at 1:29. So form your own opinion.

Emmy winners.

The list.

A lot easier to read the list than to watch the damned show. Did you watch? Do you care about anything on this list? I guess it's mildly interesting that Paul Giamatti won a best actor award "John Adams." I still haven't been able to plow through to the end of that thing, and I have the DVD set (which HBO sent me for free). I found it so alienating, the way everything seemed so small -- as if Abigail ran the farm without any help and President Adams ran the country through various one-on-one arguments with petulant egotists. And now I see that Giamatti won over Ricky Gervais in "Extras." That's just stupid.

Now, this is funny:

INDIVIDUAL PERFORMANCE IN A VARIETY OR MUSIC PROGRAM

Jon Stewart, “80th Annual Academy Awards” (ABC)
David Letterman, “Late Show With David Letterman” (CBS)
* Don Rickles, “Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project” (HBO)
Tina Fey “Saturday Night Live” (NBC)
Stephen Colbert, “The Colbert Report” (Comedy Central)

Stewart and Colbert will likely be hilarious on the subject of losing to Rickles. And Tina Fey, otherwise the darling of the night -- she won 3 Emmys -- lost to him too. Ha ha.